Varia - Agnes Repplier

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge

CONTENTS.

	Page
The Eternal Feminine	[1]
The Deathless Diary	[30]
Guides: A Protest	[63]
Little Pharisees in Fiction	[85]
The Fête de Gayant	[109]
Cakes and Ale	[130]
Old Wine and New	[155]
The Royal Road of Fiction	[185]
From the Reader’s Standpoint	[217]

“Little Pharisees in Fiction” is reprinted by permission of the publishers from “Scribner’s Magazine,” and “From the Reader’s Standpoint” from “The North American Review” (where it was called “The Contentiousness of Modern Novel Writers”).

VARIA.

THE ETERNAL FEMININE.

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance. Such a phrase—employed with tireless irrelevance in journalism, and creeping into the pages of what is, by courtesy, called literature—is the “new woman.” It has furnished inexhaustible jests to “Life” and “Punch,” and it has been received with seriousness by those who read the present with no light from the past, and so fail to perceive that all femininity is as old as Lilith, and that the variations of the type began when Eve arrived in the Garden of Paradise to dispute the claims of her predecessor. “If the fifteenth century discovered America,” says a vehement advocate of female progress, “it was reserved for the nineteenth century to discover woman;” and this remarkable statement has been gratefully applauded by people who have apparently forgotten all about Judith and Zenobia, Cleopatra and Catherine de Medici, Saint Theresa and Jeanne d’Arc, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of England, who played parts of some importance, for good and ill, in the fortunes of the world.